The five greatest Christopher Lee villains

Sir Christopher Lee, perhaps the most popular villain in British screen
history, will receive the Academy Fellowship award at this year's BAFTAs.

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Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man

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Christopher Lee as Saruman the White

By Florence Waters

4:01PM GMT 08 Feb 2011

Saruman the White

Film: The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001/2004/2006), The Hobbit (2011)

Christopher Lee was best known and loved for his early villains until he stepped into the complex role of J. R. R. Tolkein’s knowledgeable wizard Saruman. Lee portrayed Saruman as silkily smooth, with the ability to change his whole mood - expressions and voices - with disarming speed. Mid-way through the trilogy he turns to the dark side, advocating an alliance with the enemy Sauron. Saruman is Tolkein’s personification of the corruption of power; Lee makes him an eloquent leader with an icy demeanour and, perhaps most chilling of all, a man with great control over his unpredictable turns.

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Lee relishes this opportunity to break away from his Hammer gothic horror Dracula image and play a clean-cut and calculating Bond assassin who charges $1 million per kill. Scaramanga is one of the tallest (6’3’’ in the book, though Lee is 6’5’’), youngest and, with his Mediterranean good-looks and solid gold bullets, the smoothest of the Bond villains – despite his three nipples. Significantly, he has a certain respect for the British spy: "You work for peanuts, a hearty well done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension. Apart from that we are the same." Lee is Ian Flemming’s cousin in real life – ironic, since the anti-hero Scaramanga is said to be based on a quiet and unassuming country vicar to whom Fleming had taken a dislike.

Lee plays a pagan aristocrat, whose ancestor converted the inhabitants of a Scottish island from Christianity to "the old gods". He rules the island according to pagan law.

Apart from the stiff blow-dry and custard roll-necks, what makes Lee’s Lord Summerisle so utterly terrifying is his charm; he is a popular, humorous figure, with such mesmeric belief in the rites of music, cherry-blossom and fertile lushness that, Pied Piper-esque, he plays the inhabitants of the island along to his tune – and almost manages to take the audience of this film with him.

Christopher Lee’s empathetic and startlingly “normal” interpretation of Bram Stoker’s bloodsucking vampire has arguably redefined the villain in popular consciousness. Lee played the count in all-bar-one of the Hammer studio horror series, though he is recorded to have said that he was virtually "blackmailed" into doing so.

The doctor of a wheelchair bound girl, who begins to see her father's corpse around the house and its grounds, Lee’s Doctor Gerrard is by turns a reassuring and sinister character. Lee has called this excellent forgotten early suspense thriller “the best film Hammer ever made,” and describes the film’s director Seth Holt as one of the best directors Britain ever had.